The devil is in the detail

Captain's Log: Star Date 20/12/2012. Hmm, a day after my 27th birthday - a day I spent trying to convince my wife to go on bigger rollercoasters than she was willing to, and then copped out to playing with the science experiments in the kiddy's corner of the themepark we went to. Ok, that's not entirely fair, we did go on a couple of rides and I was mildly afraid of dying at one point when my restraint didn't buckle up, but that's a story for a whole other kind of blog.

The Great Prepare for Romania Strategy is going full steam ahead: so far I know the names of a few possible places I could work in Romania (McDonalds isn't one of them). I downloaded a useful guide to learn Romanian grammar here: http://fsi-language-courses.org/Courses/Romanian/FSI%20-%20Romanian%20Reference%20Grammar%20-%20Student%20Text.pdf. Don't know how useful it actually is - only time and what looks like a lot of hours will tell.

A thought just struck me: I feel like I'm starting from scratch here, but I can at least read. I mean, I don't understand what I'm reading, but at least all the lines on the screen/paper are not just little squiggles. So that puts me ahead of a Romanian six year old, right? All depends how you look at it, I guess, but I'm a cup half full kind of guy.

Rather disconcertingly, I learned that there's a male and female version of 'two', but 'three' is gender neutral. And coffee is male and biscuits are female, go figure. And you put the adjective after the noun, most of time, except in greetings, when it's fine to reverse the order. My Romanian wife shrugs and says, 'Don't ask me, I just speak the language, I didn't make the rules.' Thanks honey, lol.

I'll get there though. I already speak a second language in South Africa (Afrikaans - a localised version of Dutch), so although my mind is willing to accept that there are other languages to think in, it's not helping that in Afrikaans the letter 'v' is pronounced with an 'f' sound while in Romanian it is prounced with a 'vee' sound. 

In other news, I e-mailed the King of Romania. Not literally the king, he has a site (and a guide to Romania) here - http://kingofromania.com/. Matt recommended I contact him, but I don't know - judging from some of his posts it might be better for me to stick with Romanians who speak English rather than English (or in this case - Americans) who speak Romanian. Whoever said Romanians are cold, huh?

Yes, this third post marks a departure from my previous entries: finally we get into the nitty-gritty detail, the 'put up or shut up' preparation. Your mileage may (and probably should) differ, but I'm already getting excited about this. I just hope I can win the lottery or remotely land a high-paying job in Romania and speed things up: if anybody asks, I know stuff. What stuff? Whatever you're paying for!

There we go: another Blogger new post screen defeated. Death to the emptiness! Here's to defying the online culture of just re-tweeting and Facebook-liking things other people have created: who knows, maybe by post 2 000 I'll have more than one reader and a couple of Google bots interested in this blog. For now, dear reader (and you, dear Googlebot), good night and good luck.